Chapter 17: Questions (2)
It was never part of the plan for us to end up standing in a spot tailor-made for reporters' questions. All we had intended was to plant ourselves in the Chairman's path on his way here.
"Well then, I imagine the other side has noticed us by now and is scrambling to respond, so we'll be heading over as well. I do hope we can chat like this again sometime. Your broadcast didn't cut out midway today, did it?"
Stringing the words along like that helped a little of my senses come back, and with a joke mixed in, I made to move off—only to realize a beat too late that both my arms were still being held by the two of them.
I glanced from one side to the other and found, to my immense relief, that Hayun and Jua had let go.
"Wait just a moment, Miss Jeong Jieun...!"
A reporter cried out as I tried to step away.
"Oh, right!"
I turned to give the man a word of my own—but before I could, a sharp clap cracked through the air beside me.
"You don't have to call her that anymore! You can drop those makeshift names, too—'the black magical girl,' 'the white magical girl,' all of it!"
Huh?
At the ring of Hayun's voice, the cameras swung from me to Hayun, standing just a step away at my side.
Her face was positively glowing.
And this was the girl who had never been fond of showing her face to the press.
Hayun stretched a hand out toward me and declared,
"The girl standing here—Jieun—is, from this day forward, the sixth magical girl!"
"Hey, hold on a—"
Whatever else I said, the reporters were already stirring into an uproar.
The thing was, "magical girl" was an official position in its own right. It was like some company's employees pointing at a coworker and announcing, "This person is the department manager as of today"—words with precisely zero authority. After all, magical girls were essentially salaried staff on the Federation's payroll.
...Although, by that same logic, not one of the five current magical girls would technically count as a magical girl anymore either. Which meant that quibbling over credentials at this point probably didn't matter all that much. The thought crossed my mind, just for a second.
Was Hayun thinking the same thing?
"From today on, please call her Happy Lily!"
...
Ah.
Right.
Everyone had spent so long saying Blossom, Rose, Iris, that I'd briefly forgotten those weren't the official designations. The official ones came with Happy slapped on the front of the name.
Why "Happy," of all things? Why such a prefix needed to exist in the first place was beyond me. Then again, perhaps whoever built the magical girl system had taken inspiration from the "generation" naming of the Japanese magical girl shows the whole concept had been cribbed from.
So if I stepped into the ranks of the magical girls active in this country, and if I took up the name "Lily"—then naturally, what the world would call me was Happy Lily.
...
My lips flapped soundlessly. What excuse could I possibly offer? And even if I told the reporters no right here and now, how much good would that actually do—
And yet, entirely apart from my brain boiling over with mortification, my Hope Circuit was turning away, strong and steady.
Why?
Oh—come to think of it, Hayun's circuit was running too. Hayun's circuit was famous for burning fiercely enough to reach the circuits of other magical girls, so maybe mine had simply caught the spill from hers.
And if not that—
"Ah!"
I snatched Hayun's wrist, and she blinked at me, a little startled.
"Let's get out of here first."
With that, I kicked off into the sky. Hayun rose after me—and maybe it was my imagination, but I thought her laughter cut through the wind rushing past my ears.
As if she knew exactly what I was thinking.
I decided to pretend I hadn't heard a thing.
With the secret already out, there was no point standing here bickering with Hayun over this and that. Finish what we came to do, and save whatever conversation was left over for whatever time remained—that was the more rational call.
Dodging the gaze of Hayun, who was still smiling sweetly in my direction, I turned to the magical girls who had scrambled up after us a beat late.
"First, we find the Chairman's car."
"That much is obvious," Rose replied.
We had spent the better part of the past week talking through everything that was supposed to happen today. The plan, the Plan B for when the plan slipped, and what to do when even that slipped.
Thankfully, this was ground we knew. The view from above felt a little disorienting, but the landmark buildings poking up here and there made sharing our positions with each other simple enough.
The very first thing we'd wrestled with when drawing up the plan was, naturally, how the Chairman would behave.
Had he anticipated that we would come? We believed so.
But had he rerouted? Even if he had, it changed nothing now that he'd set out. There were six of us; if need be, we could split into teams. We could all fly, besides—one detour and we'd lose him? The drive from headquarters to this spot took less than twenty minutes to begin with.
And what car was he in? For the sake of camouflage, maybe something not too expensive. Public transport, at least, was surely out—far too dangerous in every possible way.
The Chairman could have worn the same sort of mask I'd used to hide my face, but James had judged that the current Chairman was not the type to go anywhere so inconspicuous. The man's personality, as James described it, was that of a big-shot villain straight out of a comic book.
He would do anything for money. Unlike the Former Chairman, who had picked his way along the hairline between legal and illegal, the current one reasoned that if you made enough money, you could simply buy the laws you wanted.
Giant corporations did have a habit of scoffing at the laws of nations they considered beneath them—and Noir Corporation's current Chairman was exactly that kind of man.
"Which is why he most likely took a luxury vehicle," James had surmised.
"If there's nothing but a driver up front, though, he could get away with something smaller."
"Did you know? The place where the Chairman is summoned will be swarming with an absolutely staggering number of reporters. He is not the sort of man who cares to be seen stepping out of the same car everybody else rides in."
Certain executives, after all, played up their "humility" precisely by driving something ordinary.
"A man's nature doesn't change so easily. Besides, the current Chairman takes his personal safety very, very seriously. He would want a car that keeps him alive even if someone with a grudge rams him from the side."
Which was to say: a man with an awful lot of skeletons in his closet.
Come to think of it, wasn't it always the ones who made their money through illegal means who paraded their wealth around in absurdly expensive cars?
We had already heard all of this from James, which meant our job here was, quite literally, to find a car that matched the description.
Such cars did appear now and then in the middle of downtown Seoul—but this was Jung-gu, where the government office complexes clustered thick together, and plenty of perfectly ordinary vehicles passed through as well.
So: pick out the one headed from the company to the Prosecutor's Office. If anything, since we had arrived a little later than planned, the Chairman's car would have pushed closer to the summons site before turning around.
"Of the vehicles in view—excluding anything parked—I count roughly six."
Iris swept her gaze across the surroundings as she spoke, and small clumps of mana drifted along with her line of sight. Vision-assist magic, perhaps? She had mentioned she was preparing a new piece of equipment with Cherry and James—apparently this was it.
Six vehicles, all of them big, solid, and expensive-looking.
And we happened to number six.
"Let's split up and check them. Everyone still has their pagers, right?"
The girls held their pagers up in answer, and we scattered along Iris's directions.
Flying straight along my assigned heading, I spotted one car that oozed authority at a glance. I normally couldn't care less about cars, so the emblem alone didn't tell me the make—but it was certainly nothing manufactured in Korea.
I touched down in front of the long black sedan.
Traffic around here was always snarled. The roads were wide enough, but this was the heart of Seoul—endless passing cars, and more than anything, streets so tangled up with intersections and signals that a clean getaway in any direction was next to impossible.
That car, too, was boxed in bumper to bumper, so the thought of mowing me down and bolting... shouldn't have crossed anyone's mind.
And yet the instant I planted myself in front of it, the engine roared up to a ferocious pitch.
Before anyone inside could have confirmed who I was, the car came charging straight at me.
I jammed the shaft of my hammer into the pavement and stopped it—barely—but there was nothing to be done about my own body skidding backward.
It was only because there had been almost no room to speak of that we were fine. If there had been a good twenty meters of open road, Hayun's circuit might have flipped right over.
...
What kind of thought was that, even.
Hayun must have acted to back me up because she'd seen my circuit running—nothing more, I told myself. Anything else was off the table. Let myself hope too much, and I'd only end up feeling betrayed, all on my own.
Honestly, from where anyone else stood, was there anywhere a sorrier sight of a one-sided crush than mine?
The sedan's nose had crumpled, but it hadn't split apart or anything. The engine, apparently, still had some life in it; the car slammed straight into reverse.
"Whoa, hey—"
Before I could block it a second time, it rammed the car behind at full force. Then, without so much as a glance at the driver it had just crumpled, the black sedan wrenched its wheel hard over, crossed the center line, and pulled an illegal U-turn.
I yanked out my pager, pressed it, and took off running for the rear car.
The poor little compact just sat there, hood folded flat, not so much as twitching.
When I rapped my knuckles on the windshield, the middle-aged man sitting inside in a daze rolled his window down.
"Are you okay?"
"Huh? Ah—yes. I'm not hurt, but..."
"That car just now belongs to Noir Corporation. If you end up with any bills over this, you bill them—make sure of it."
"What?"
"And call the police first. Tell them I was chasing that car, and they'll probably catch on right away."
If I'm being honest with myself, a small part of me wasn't so sure they would. I'd heard the police's opinion of me was decent, but I had no memory of ever actually exchanging words with one.
But I couldn't exactly leave this poor man standing there with nothing, could I?
It suddenly occurred to me—the other magical girls, repairing the houses and property broken in their battles, bowing in apology. ...Maybe magical girls had hardships all their own. Hardships far heavier than having to sprint out of a classroom in the middle of an English listening exam.
I patted the window frame twice with my hand, turned on my heel, and ran flat out.
Hayun's voice burst from the pager clipped to my shoulder as I ran.
I very nearly tripped over my own feet at the sound of that name, but I managed to recover my stance and launch skyward, springing off the pavement like a sprinter off the blocks.
"What's with that name?"
I had an enormous amount to say to that. I swallowed every last word of it and returned to the matter at hand.
"I think I found it. The car I blocked bolted the second I stopped it."
"Uh—yeah, they were?"
I answered with a small twinge of unease at how much Hayun sounded like she'd already known.
Iris picked up right on the heels of Hayun's words.
"Even to rounds made of magic?"
That was Dahlia's voice.
A classic trick, too—and all the more effective for it.
"...Then you're telling me there may be other cars out there besides the one we're chasing. Other vehicles that could pass for at least a token show of authority?"
Delphinium's words dropped me into a short silence.
...
Even if the real objective wasn't to strike the Chairman directly, being handed a loss like this honestly stung.
"Then let's nail down the car we're chasing first. We wrap this up as fast as we can, then fall back to Plan B. At the very least, we have to show the Chairman that we are genuinely angry."
The girls answered, and I kept after the black car.
Yes, a car outruns a running human—but I wasn't chasing it on foot. Flying beats sprinting not merely because you can ignore friction with the ground, but above all because at that speed you don't have to care one bit about obstacles or the state of the road.
I overtook the black car—threading its slalom between bumpers—from the air, kicked the boosters on the back of my hammer into gear, and brought the head down square on its front end.
CRUNCH!
The car's nose dove deep into the roadbed, and its rear whipped upward, buckling as though about to snap.
Now, then. What next?
Just how much tougher than an ordinary car was this thing, really? It had caved in wretchedly against my hammer—but of course it had; my hammer might as well have been an artillery shell.
And wasn't that windshield tint pushing it? Tint that dark had to be illegal. Could the driver even make out what color the lights were?
...Though I suppose a man who carved human beings up into weapons had little reason to sweat the small stuff.
In the slimmest slice of a second, I finished my assessment, leapt, and seized the car by its trunk—right before the folded front end crumpled the rest of the way and the roof kissed the asphalt.
Thankfully, the car did not get its rear torn off and pancaked into the ground. It simply caught my strength midair and flung itself back up the other way.
I did spare a brief thought for whoever was riding inside.
Well—if they'd remembered to buckle up, they probably weren't dead. Probably.
THUD!
I set the car back down on the pavement and reached through the shattered window.
"...Hhk—!"
My arm was yanked deep inside, and I clenched my fingers in a hurry.
Whatever had seized my hand, its grip was no ordinary human strength.
A kaijin.
So that was why no groans or screams had ever come from inside the car.
I planted one foot against the rear door and kicked hard. The door caved inward, the whole back half of the car shoved sideways—and whatever was inside slid partway out with it.
And what met my eyes was, predictably, a human hand.
Grossly, forcibly swollen, as though pumped up from within.
...
I never dreamed the very man being summoned over this whole affair would fish the exact same trick back out of the drawer—a kaijin—just to shake the magical girls off his tail.
Had he found some way to control it, maybe? Control was never something that came easy with a kaijin.
Like the opening move of a test of strength, the kaijin hauled me deeper into the car. Unfortunately, pound for pound, I was overwhelmingly the lighter one. Bracing on raw strength alone had its limits.
KKRAK.
The window gave way, and I was dragged bodily inside.
"Tch."
Figures.
The driver's seat stood empty. Autopilot, then. These were aliens who built starships—of course they'd have something like that.
And then—
"...You are really, really not my type."
I said that to the kaijin whose eyes had locked onto mine.
The kaijin raised its free hand—the one not wrapped around my arm—in a threatening arc, poised to drive an elbow into me.
Except I still had a hammer in my other hand, didn't I.
The boosters fired, and the hammer in my grip surged upward—then tore straight through the car's roof and cracked the kaijin across the temple.
WHAM!
Poor thing, really. Maybe because the original had been an Earthling, sympathy came a little easier than usual.
Besides, he'd hardly asked to end up like this.
...No—was I reading too far into things? Even if not, it wasn't the sort of thinking I had any business doing right now.
Cracking the kaijin's skull with my hammer had gone swimmingly—but in the process, I had managed to trap myself inside the crushed car as well. Damn it.
Note to self: think a step further ahead.
Hayun had been tugging at one corner of my mind since earlier, and the mere thought of the Chairman lit my blood on fire from the other side—my focus kept slipping apart at the seams.
WHAM!
"Kgh—!"
A knee hammered into my back.
Looking again, the restraint pinning this kaijin down was something special—not the seatbelts the rest of us buckle in cars, but something cut from the same stuff as the carapace-armor they fitted onto other kaijin.
WHAM!
"Ow— I said that hurts!"
I shouted it and pushed myself upright again.
Crrreak. Crrreak.
Hands endowed with the circuit's power—strength beyond any human's—crumpled the car's ceiling like paper. From somewhere close by, something that sounded like screaming seemed to rise.
And as I rose with it, my eyes finally landed on the circuit mounted in the kaijin's chest.
I raised my fist and drove a straight punch into the device.
"GRAAAAAGH—!"
The kaijin was launched clean off its seat by the blow.
There we go. At least it was out of the car now.